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By Root 2248 0

worked with mother of pearl and silver and gold, considered Nicholas to be overprivileged. Nevertheless the lawyer was kind enough, as his elder and tutor, to share his superior acquaintance with the city, hurrying Nicholas through the shadowy maze of bazaars to investigate the retail price for ginger and indigo; paying aggressive calls on the weavers of silk carpets and embarking on inquisitions in the billowing heat around the kilns where thin tiles were sawn into their intricate shapes, and glazed, and fired, and laid face down on the faintly lined, age-old cartoons to receive their backing of plaster. Tabrizi tiles clothed the great mosque at Bursa. Tabrizi ceramists had become masters in Cairo, in Damascus. Astonished, Julius inspected, from the outside, the vast red-brick bulk of the citadel. He even got into the hospital, and examined the herb garden and pharmacy which he reported, with mystification, to be as good as that of the Knights of St John.

Nicholas obliged him by letting him do it, and experienced thankfulness mixed with contrition when, attending the great marketplace of the Meidan, Julius did not have to be deterred from leaping into the stadium with the wrestlers, or taking the place of the men tussling with wolves, but watched from the side, not far from the gallery used by Uzum Hasan’s younger sons, too small as yet for rebellion. His daughters, his two unmarried Christian daughters, were absent with their Christian mother at Kharput. No other Venetian envoy was about to observe her in bed with her husband.

It was obvious, then, that Julius was not quite the man that had been. He declared as much, without words, by inviting Nicholas to the bathhouse he favoured, so that the other man might admire, along with his trim, well-preserved body, the ragged scar, scarlet and angry, that marred it. But Julius, sleek with massage and bath-oils, seemed actually to hold no grudge over that, and if, strolling home pink and scented, he took care to leave a certain space between himself and his dimpled companion, it was only because of the other young men who walked, hand in hand, in that district.

He had asked, several times, whether or not Nicholas had yet had his audience, and Nicholas had assured him that he hadn’t. It was not strictly true. In fact it was not at all true. Within that short time, Nicholas had been summoned twice to secret enclave in the Palace: once to see a chamberlain he knew well at second hand, and the second time to answer to the Persian ruler himself.

That meeting had not taken place among the gold cushions and flowering carpets of the divine royal kiosk with its twining rivulet of sweet running water. Uzum Hasan received this alien merchant beneath the dome of a carved timber room, sheltered by awnings and set apart under a spread of ancient elms. His chief minister and a clerk were also present, but no singers or dancers accompanied them, or the liquid voices of poets, intoning the love-crazed nightingale’s songs of Hafiz. Only somewhere, disembodied by distance, a man’s voice seemed to be singing, perhaps in melancholy, perhaps lulling another to sleep.

Nicholas de Fleury lowered his eyes and performed, without haste, the sequence of obeisances which brought him kneeling at length before this old man, leader and warrior, whom even Zacco had esteemed. A man whose oldest son wished to kill him. Nicholas uttered the conventional greeting, ‘Salam aleikom,’ and received the tart rejoinder due to Franks: ‘Peace be with those who follow the right path.’ He lifted his head.

As he knew already, the face he saw was not that of the cast of magnificent Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes or Alexander who conquered the world. Their civilisations had been followed by six hundred years of Arab rule, and then another two hundred of Mongol devastation by Genghis Khan and his successors. This was the lord of a Turcoman state who had managed to conquer and hold the western part of a great land mass which the West regarded as Persia, and you could see his inheritance in the slight Mongolian cast of the lids, the